December 13, 2007

The Boy Who Would Live Forever

The Boy Who Would Live Forever is the fifth novel in Frederik Pohl's Heechee saga, and sort of falls outside of the previous novels by focusing on a completely new set of characters and separate plot line. The two main characters in this book are Stan, a boy who used to live close to poverty until getting to Gateway, and Estrella, whose background is more of a mystery. Together they become the first human visitors to the Heechee core, where time moves 40,000 times slower than on the outside. Klara and Albert Einstein play secondary roles, as well as Wan who is something of a galactic annoyance who cannot be ignored.

This time a lot of time is spent illustrating how the Heechee live in the core and on their cultural differences from Homo sapiens. I found some of that interesting simply because of the Heechee's tremendous influence in the previous novels, but honestly there isn't a whole lot of newness to this novel in the series. It feels much more like an auxiliary novel instead of an important one.

Posted by josuah at December 13, 2007 4:09 PM UTC+00:00